Original title: Trends in Volume, Timeliness, and Reporting Quality of Oncology Systematic and Scoping Reviews: A 25-Year Analysis
Nandi Edwards, Hadia Malik, Daniel Zhang, Gabriel Boldt +3 · September 2026
Cancer treatments change rapidly, so doctors depend on big overview papers called systematic reviews and scoping reviews to summarize research. Researchers wanted to see how many of these reviews get published, how long they take to come out, and if authors log their research plans ahead of time. To test this, scientists screened thousands of cancer review articles using human reviewers and a computer tool. They found a massive surge in review volume, jumping from 61 reviews in 2000 to 6313 in 2024. However, speed has not improved. For reviews reporting their search dates, the average wait from searching to publishing stayed at 13 months over time. Furthermore, only 4.5% of reviews noted a registered plan in their abstract. This means that while cancer reviews are booming, their freshness and verifiability remain real problems.
Imagine you're planning a big family dinner and want to know what everyone can eat. You ask each relative about allergies, but it takes you a month to collect all the answers. By the time you cook, some people's diets have changed. Now imagine you do this every year, but you never write down your plan beforehand, so no one can check if you asked the right questions. In this paper, the reviews are like those dinner plans—they take over a year to finish, and most don't record their methods in advance, making them less reliable for guiding decisions.
Doctors and policymakers rely on reviews of cancer research to make treatment decisions. If reviews take over a year to publish and rarely report whether their methods were registered, the evidence they use may be outdated or hard to verify. This matters for anyone whose care depends on the latest oncology findings.
The abstract does not assess the quality of the reviews themselves, only their volume, timeliness, and registration reporting. It also relies on abstract-level data, which may undercount registrations that are reported in full texts. The 2025 data are incomplete, so trends for that year are not comparable.
Ask anything about this paper. Answers come from its abstract, and say so when the abstract doesn't cover your question.
Trends in Volume, Timeliness, and Reporting Quality of Oncology Systematic and Scoping Reviews: A 25-Year Analysis — Nandi Edwards, Hadia Malik, Daniel Zhang et al. — Current Oncology — doi:10.3390/curroncol33090571
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.